Disney flops as it tries to wring more money out of its undersea treasure.
(Bloomberg) — Here’s an inescapable fact that’s been known by humans ever since they were bold enough to sail the seven seas: When you drag something from underwater to the surface, it ends up a limp, bedraggled mess.
Whenever mermaids breach the surface of the ocean in the new live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, this bears out: It’s usually awkward, cringeworthy or even laugh-out-loud ridiculous. When poor King Triton bobs out of the water in a what’s supposed to be an emotionally powerful scene, he bears all the noble heft of the plastic king from the Burger King commercials. Reba McEntire did it better in Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar. The normally gorgeous Ariel doesn’t fare much better.
This waterlogged conundrum is one of many that Disney somehow couldn’t solve, despite working with one of its most enchanting pieces of intellectual property and having the world’s top CGI wizards at its disposal. Paging the team who did Namor’s hair and pecs in Wakanda Forever. This is a fairy tale—where’s the magic?
Thankfully, it still runs through the story. It’s the one you know well: A cheery mermaid, Ariel (played by the absolutely incandescent Halle Bailey), rescues a sweet prince (actual Earth angel Jonah Hauer-King) from a shipwreck and falls in love with him. She makes a deal with Ursula, the power-hungry sea witch (Melissa McCarthy, doing her best to chew the scenery but at best suctioning it), to trade her voice in exchange for the ability to become a human for three days. In that time, she must get the prince, Eric, to fall in love with her and kiss her. Through it all, she’s aided by her rascally friends: the childlike Flounder; Sebastian, the crabby crab; and Scuttle, the harebrained seagull.
There are some added layers to this version: Ursula makes Ariel forget that she needs to get Eric to kiss her, which does add some needed tension to the story of two gorgeous people who obviously love each other fighting the odds to share a smooch.
And the hatred that King Triton, played by Javier Bardem, fosters for humans is now explained by the fact that they’re destroying the oceans and they killed his wife. It’s decent motivation, but here Bardem’s bold impassivity (so electric in more serious films) combines with the film’s bad visual effects to give his face a plasticky vibe. Does he care about any of this? It makes you wish he’d just say to Ariel, “Have it your way,” and be done with it. No one ever does anything about the ocean pollution in the end.
Prince Eric, who is White, is adopted, which makes it possible for his mother to be Black, and thus not seem like his family are colonizers on the generic, multiracial Caribbean island they rule over. He’s given more of his own motivation—he yearns to explore the sea and build bridges to other cultures so he can bring knowledge and understanding back to his home island. He seems like a nice guy.
But then he sings. Without the genius of the late Howard Ashman, who wrote the impish lyrics in the original, Disney paired original composer Alan Menken with lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda, the mastermind behind the earworms in Encanto and Moana. The two give Eric his own painfully earnest ballad, “Uncharted Waters,” whose treacly lyrics he belts while staring out into the ocean and yearning for Ariel. I’d rather those waters had remained uncharted.
But that’s nothing compared with the full-blown rap, “The Scuttlebutt,” that’s delivered by Scuttle the seagull, who needs to tell Sebastian about the gossip running around town that the prince is going to propose to someone. Scuttle is voiced by Awkwafina, who’s never not funny—except here. In the screening I attended, many grown adults covered their faces to avoid looking at the screen. Both songs feel like first drafts.
The unpolished tone extends to the sets and the costumes on land, which have the bright, generic blandness of an ad for a Sandals all-inclusive resort. Underwater scenes look like the kind of video you see behind the lyrics at a karaoke bar. And after multiple live-action remakes—from The Lion King to Aladdin to Beauty and the Beast—Disney still can’t decide whether they want animals to have faces that move like human ones. The result is an unsettling mishmash that’s never more off-putting than during the song “Under the Sea,” when Sebastian (who does have eyeballs and a mouth) attempts to persuade Ariel to stay away from the humans.
Like the rest of the songs, it’s performed excellently, in this case by Daveed Diggs, who voices Sebastian. But the sequence closely mirrors the animated version, and that’s unfortunate. The original is adorable and joyous, and features sea creatures with cherubic, smiling faces. But in the 2023 version, they are faceless, and thus (sorry, fish) they’re simply not as fun to watch. Both the old and new numbers end with the camera rapidly cutting between all the sea creatures that are “dancing.” In the animated version, this moment is a triumph. In the modern iteration—as the camera jumps between a manta ray’s belly and a snail’s arm and a starfish’s … hole, I guess—you just wonder “What the hell am I looking at?”
In fact, the main problem of the film is that director Rob Marshall can’t decide what it he wants it to be. Is it a romantic nostalgia play for millennial adults? The way the camera lingers longingly on the aggressively flawless faces of Bailey and Hauer-King, you would think yes. Certainly, little kids don’t want to sit through all those aching close-ups and lonely, pensive walks along wave-battered cliffs. And yet adults will know the original film and will know this isn’t as good. So I suppose the point is for children to fall in love with it anew. (The original film was quite scary in parts, and this one is, too—including one intense scene where Ariel and Flounder are chased by a massive shark—so no real kowtowing to kids on that front.)
Which brings me to another pair of inescapable facts that have been known by humans ever since they were bold enough to sail the seven seas: Sailors will always fall in love with the siren song of mermaids. And so will little children.
It doesn’t matter whether critics like this movie, or voters on Rotten Tomatoes. It doesn’t even matter that Ariel’s gossamer tail looks like it’s made from a cheap polyester blend. This movie is still going to make a billion dollars.
And that’s fine. The actors are wonderful—and, in the case of Bailey and Hauer-King, quite magnetic—and the story is one of the canon’s most magical. In Diggs, Awkwafina, McCarthy and Jacob Tremblay as Flounder, Marshall has picked a very strong supporting team. It’s still got a fair amount of the fun of the original. But, to quote Ariel, I want more. Disney admirably cast a Black actress as Ariel, and actors of color in almost every single other role except Eric and Ursula—and yet it decided against doing anything interesting or important with its depiction of the Caribbean.
The original The Little Mermaid is a wonder of originality; it’s a treasure. To watch Disney wring a few extra hundred million out of this precious IP just because it can, and not because it had anything valuable to add to it, is sad. It just feels like something the greedy Ursula would do.
Some treasures are best left under the sea.
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